Reflections on Katalepsis, Plans for Book Two, and the future! (And a Q&A!)

Hello everyone!

This is probably going to be a really long, meandering, self-indulgent post — mostly reflections on Katalepsis and how far I’ve come since the beginning, my plans for what’s up next and thoughts on Book Two, as well as some minor administrative stuff at the end. I’ll put little headings to try to separate out my ramblings, but it’s still going to be a lot.

So, please don’t feel any obligation at all to read all this! I’m sure some of this will be of interest to long-time readers and fans, but if you want the short version, well, here you go!

The short version

Katalepsis Book Two (which might have an actual title all to itself) will begin publishing, for patrons, on the 15th of March! It might start earlier if things go really well for me, but the 15th of March is the hard deadline. Public chapters will launch 2 weeks after that, on the 29th of March!

If you’re waiting for more Katalepsis, that’s all you gotta know. Thank you so much for all your support through Book One; I cannot express my gratitude enough, no words do it justice, and I am humbled by the opportunity to keep writing stories for you. I’m very excited for Book Two, I hope you are as well, and I’ll see you there!

There’s also a Q&A post going up very shortly after I publish this post; if you want to see that without reading all of the below, I’ll put a link right here!

The long version

And now for the long version!

Like I said, this is probably going to be really self-indulgent — a writer writing about writing. I usually try to keep these non-story posts as short and concise as I can, but I figure I’ve earned a bit of self-indulgence, having just put the capstone on 6 years and 2.5 million words of web serial. So! Do forgive this one lapse into garrulous chatter, if you do happen to read it all. I hope some of it is interesting.

Katalepsis, reflections, and thank you

First off, Katalepsis Book One!

It’s … it’s done! Heather’s quest, the story I set out to write in late 2018, first hatched over 15 years ago in a bunch of confused scribblings, is complete. I must admit that it feels really strange to be here, at the end of the story. This isn’t the first writing project I’ve ever completed, but it is by far the longest, the most complex, and the most successful, beyond my wildest dreams. I’ve mentioned this before a couple of times, but back when I started Katalepsis, I had no idea if it would be at all popular, if I would have any readers at all, or if it would just be a sort of hobby project confined to my spare time. When I started it I committed myself to finishing the story no matter what, even if I would end up only writing a little bit each evening. Even without a single reader, I would simply write it and publish it and ride the energy of the story itself, wherever it took me.

But that wasn’t what happened. Slowly, over the first couple of years, readers started turning up, leaving comments, and even subscribing to the patreon, which stunned me. I didn’t even have cover art for the first 6-8 months! These days that would be unthinkable.

I made a discord server toward the end of 2019, which slowly started to fill up with readers and fans. Readers started to live-blog their reactions, or turn up every Saturday for a regular frenzy of comments on each new chapter. People drew fanart and wrote fanfiction! Those two things still absolutely blow my mind. Seriously, the novelty has not worn off, and I suspect it never will. I can’t believe there’s so much fanart and fanfiction of Katalepsis! It’s … I just don’t have words. I’m still in awe, every time it happens.

I’m not exactly sure when that process hit a critical mass, but slowly I started to realise that this was real. People wanted to read my fiction, and were happy to pay me so I could keep writing it. Things eventually reached a point — financially and personally — where it just made sense to concentrate all my efforts on writing fiction, because it turned out a lot of people enjoy reading the kinds of stories I want to write. Not just Katalepsis, but Necroepilogos as well, and possibly other future projects too.

I never expected this. I hoped for it, of course, but I didn’t think it would really happen. Every day I am still amazed that this is now what I do for a living.

And I have all of you to thank.

I am astoundingly bad at self-promotion. I never tried to game the algorithm over on Royal Road, which I hear so much about these days. I never tried to tailor my stories for popularity. Despite my genuine (and slightly vexing) love of cliffhangers, I never set about trimming or cutting chapters for ‘engagement’. When it comes to marketing, I have no idea what I’m doing! All I know is how to tell stories.

You have collectively catapulted me into the position I am in now — a professional writer, I guess, which still feels incredibly weird to say. This is my job. This is what I do. And I love doing it.

I am humbled beyond words. I know, I know, I’ve said this before, I tend to repeat this point, but really, I don’t even know what to say. Thank you! I cannot express my gratitude. Words fail me here. It is my dearest wish that I can continue doing this for many years to come, with Katalepsis, with Necroepilogos, and with future projects as well. I will keep doing my absolute best, every day, every chapter, whatever story I’m writing, for all of you, the readers.

Thank you. Those words still don’t seem like enough.

I’m getting off track! Where was I? Ah, right — Katalepsis.

This story has been my life for the last 6 years. Yes, it’s not the only thing I’ve been writing, but it’s taken the lion’s share of my attention and effort. Heather and all those around her have lived at the forefront of my thoughts constantly, and that’s not an exaggeration. Writing, for me, happens all the time, even when I’m physically away from the keyboard. So, it’s a very strange feeling to finally be taking this brief step back from them.

Critique, improvement, and Heather

This does, however, allow me to run a critical eye over the story.

While I am of course incredibly proud of what Katalepsis is and how many readers have loved it and been moved by it, I’m also keenly aware of the story’s flaws.

No story is perfect, after all; it’s often the flaws and complications and compromises which produce some of the best things in any creative work. Some of the most popular and exciting parts of Katalepsis actually grew out of me desperately trying to keep the plates spinning, or realising the characters were pulling away from my plans, or getting myself into a huge tangled mess behind the scenes and trying to chart a way out of the storm. Often those parts turned out more exciting and satisfying for readers than the bits which went perfectly to plan behind the scenes. Over time I learned to embrace that aspect of the process, to make it the core of what I do.

If I was to write Katalepsis all over again, are there things I would do differently? Probably, yes. But in the end even the flaws and mistakes and missteps are part of the final story. The story would not have gone where it did without the flaws.

I’m getting into the weeds again! Sorry about that. Anyway, I’ll get to the point.

Something I’ve not really spoken about much is how I’ve grown and changed as a writer over the course of writing Katalepsis. This isn’t just me navel-gazing and tooting my own horn, really. Some readers have noticed this and pointed it out; a couple of readers said that my writing became “less apologetic” over time, and now that I’ve been able to reflect on that, I think it’s true. Necroepilogos helped with that a lot, too, in a way that Katalepsis perhaps couldn’t.

Even as I learned and improved while writing Katalepsis, I wasn’t able to put all of those lessons and improvements into action within Katalepsis itself. The story was naturally constrained by one of the things which is also its greatest strength — Heather’s POV.

Katalepsis is a single-POV story, told by a deeply unreliable narrator, who is also … well, Heather!

What can I say about her? If you’ve read the story, you probably know what I mean; Heather can be completely impossible, so deeply wrapped up in her own perspective, impulsive and stubborn and self-destructive, and so on and so on, and nobody knows that better than me. Don’t get me wrong, I love Heather — truly, I love that woman; she has lived in the centre of my mind for well over 6 years now, and it’s hard not to come to love a protagonist when you write about them every single day for that long, in a story like this one, all about her personal growth and healing and self-acceptance and … yeah.

But the story has been constrained by the nature of her POV, unable to follow other characters with the detail which they perhaps deserve (and readers want!), and also unable to peel away from the central conflict of the story — rescuing Maisie.

There are two places where I was able to put all those lessons into practice. The first was (and still is) Necroepilogos, my other serial, which has multiple POVs and a vastly different tone. That allowed me to stretch my narrative and descriptive muscles in directions that Katalepsis didn’t really have room for.

The second place is Katalepsis arc 24, Bedlam Boundary.

See, Bedlam Boundary was planned right from the beginning of the story. I knew that eventually Heather was going to be cast into this dream-play nightmare version of her time at the real Cygnet Hospital. This was always planned to contain the showdown with the Eye, the proof of how far Heather had come, the opportunity to face all her inner traumas, the chance to rescue all her friends, and Maisie’s return, and so on and so on. Most of the broad strokes were planned from the start, including Eileen, the Guilt Leviathan, and what everybody would be like in the dream-Cygnet.

What I did not expect or plan for was the sheer bloody-minded size of Bedlam Boundary. I had no idea it would end up that long! But the way I set it up and the way I kept feeding it all the space it needed, the arc ended up like a novel unto itself — part of Katalepsis, yet somehow distinct from it. I’m still amazed that it worked so well in the end, I’m still digesting how it functioned, still not quite over it myself!

However, I don’t think I could have brought that all to life anywhere near as powerfully as I did, if I hadn’t first stretched out my writing muscles over in Necroepilogos. Bedlam Boundary sits slightly apart from the rest of Katalepsis Book One — literally, since all the characters are transported to a physical dream/metaphysical play, and that allowed me to reset all the playing pieces of the story, put all the characters together in a new place, and briefly shed all of the usual connective tissue and sinews of the story, regrowing them anew. The playing board was cleared off, and that allowed me to bring in a lot of the techniques I’d been learning elsewhere.

Book Two

Which brings us to Book Two.

And hey, I not even sure if it’s going to be called ‘Book Two’.

My original plan for Katalepsis, back before I published the first chapter, was a three-book structure: Book One was meant to be Heather’s quest to rescue her sister; Book Two was going to be a sort of expansion of the setting into a bunch of the other characters and their conflicts; and then Book Three was going to be a huge climax combining all the stuff from the second book with Heather and Maisie from the first book.

That original plan did not survive contact with the page — or more precisely, with Heather. As I wrote, I let the characters themselves determine the direction of the story, and the narrative of what is now Book One ended up incorporating a lot of what I had planned for the original version of Book Two, exploring much of the secondary and tertiary cast earlier than I had expected. Book Three is now right out; most of the stuff which was going to be in Book Three I’m now going to be adding to the upcoming actual Book Two.

Um, if that makes any sense at all?

See why I might need fresh terminology?

Anyway, Book Two is also going to be very different to Book One; I’ve said this before, in random comments, and on the discord server, but I figure it’s worth laying it out here, ‘officially’. Book Two is going to be very different in structure, of course. It’s not going to be from Heather’s POV, either. Heather’s POV might turn up now and again — she’s still around, of course, she’s right there, with Maisie — but the story is mostly going to be told from other perspectives, multiple other perspectives. Heather gave us a little metatextual hint of this at the end of the final chapter of Book One, as she outlined very roughly some of the plot lines and perspectives we might see.

My aim with Book Two is to follow all of the secondary plots and characters which we couldn’t explore in Book One, due to the nature and structure of Heather’s story. The narrative is going to broaden the setting outward and follow several different POVs, some who might be doing totally different things, in different places! There’s still an overarching plot structure, but the way I’m planning to handle this might be a bit more like a series of novellas, sharing characters and some events, hopping back and forth depending on who is currently most interesting to follow. If you’ve been reading my other story, Necroepilogos, imagine that POV-switching technique but on a larger scale, with longer sections of narrative spent on each particular POV before switching elsewhere.

At least, that’s the plan! My last plan did not survive contact with Heather alone; I have no doubt this one will be torn up and spread around the room in shredded fragments the moment the cast get their hands on it. And hey, I’m looking forward to that! Riding that wave, fuelling that process, allowing the characters to take charge — I think that’s become one of the best aspects of my own storytelling technique.

I don’t think there will be a Book Three, no matter how much I love these characters.

Don’t worry! I plan to write for the rest of my life, frankly, and if I’m still writing fiction fifteen or twenty years from now (I hope so! cosmos willing!), then I suspect the cast of Katalepsis will be cropping up in short stories or side-projects forever. But, for now, Book Two is all I have planned.

I do believe in endings, in allowing a piece of fiction to finally end and be complete and rest. That’s how I’m treating Katalepsis Book One — Heather’s story is over. Book Two is more like a real sequel, rather than a continuation of the story in Book One. This will be something new and different.

So, I think it needs a new name!

I haven’t decided on what, not just yet. It’s still going to be on the same website and listing and everything, I think, but I feel like Book Two deserves its own narrative label, rather than lying entirely in the shadow of Heather’s journey.

Difficulties

The shadow of Heather’s journey. Right.

Here’s where we come to a difficult part. I don’t tend to say very much about difficulties behind the scenes, but I want to share a little about this one, because it’s unique, it’s directly about Katalepsis so far. I want to get it out there, on the page, with the hopes that expressing it will help the process.

Katalepsis Book One relied on Heather’s perspective — her voice, her way of expressing herself, the ways in which she judges and values and perceives the world, her relationships with others, all of her, every last bit of Heather Lavinia Morell. It’s not just that the plot of Katalepsis is about Heather’s journey and her physical transformation and the rescue of her sister, but that her voice itself forms so much of the identity of the story. Katalepsis is what it is because of Heather — her unreliable narration, her idiosyncrasies, her obsessions, her … everything! Katalepsis is Heather; Heather is Katalepsis!

I don’t know what it’s going to be like without her voice.

Now, writing Necroepilogos for the last couple of years has allowed me to prove to myself that I’m not a one-trick pony; I absolutely can write other POVs, plenty of other POVs, and many readers have enjoyed that a great deal. So, hooray! That is a significant amount of pressure and worry already off my shoulders.

But can I write Katalepsis without Heather? What is this story, without her POV?

I don’t know for sure. I’ve already done plenty of little test runs with some other POVs, and I know that they’ll take further shape once they hit the page, but … will they be as fun to follow, for the audience who have been following Heather all this time? I don’t know; I can’t know, not for sure, not until we’re ‘doing it live’, as the saying goes. There is no other choice but to crack on and find out.

Part of me is even worried that Book Two won’t work, at least not in the same way. I will do my absolute best, of course, I’ve already begun the process, I’m already working on it all, behind the scenes. But there’s always the possibility of failure, and I wanted to openly address it, put it out there, before I carry on.

One solution to this problem would be simply to write something else. Before anybody panics, I want to emphasize that I’m talking hypothetically here, in order to air out my plans. A solution to the creative anxieties about Book Two would be to write something else for a year or so, pivot to a different serial, in order to stretch my writing muscles in a different direction and so on.

But, you know, I’m already getting that from Necroepilogos.

So! Even if Book Two has a rocky start, or encounters problems, I’m committing to fighting through any mistakes and errors and finding the right path, and that’s what I intend to do!

Beyond Katalepsis

Right then! With that difficult part out of the way, I want to gesture at the future more broadly.

Some of you have already seen my Not-So-Secret List of Future Projects; for those who haven’t, this is a series of rough sketches — I wouldn’t really call them blurbs, I’m terrible at writing blurbs. These are almost all of the future stories I want to write, beyond Katalepsis Book Two. These rough sketches are all just iceberg tips, my clumsy attempts to condense the flavour and tone of thousands of words of notes and experimental scenes, and in some cases, entire drafted novels.

In the time since I wrote up that list, some of those concepts have developed further, to the point where I’m confident I could now either launch them as serials or write them as novels.

The other thing I’ve learned is that writing two serials at once is my limit; there’s no way I could possibly fit in a third, no matter how enthusiastic I am. Writing a standalone novel at the same time is a bit more possible, seeing as such a project would not have regular deadlines, but it would still be a stretch. At the moment, I think these concepts will have to wait! But I am looking forward to several of them.

I’m also planning to make some additions to that list — two, possibly three blurbs/outlines/sketches. I wanted to have these ready in time for this post, but they haven’t finished brewing yet. I’ll probably be adding them in a few weeks’ time, and maybe drop a sneaky little post here.

One of those concepts is … well, it’s for a magical girl story, which has been slowly brewing in the back of my mind since I started Necroepilogos. It’s taken quite rapid shape over the last year or two, from nothing to near-full details in record time, for me. I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself when I’m planning to be fully focused on Katalepsis Book Two, but right now I’m tentatively playing with the idea of making this my next project, after Katalepsis and Necroepilogos.

Of course, that’s way in the future! Things can easily change between then and now. But I plan to update the story list sometime soon.

Odds and ends

So! With all the heavy stuff out of the way, I have some logistics and administrative matters to tidy up!

Most importantly — when is Book Two going to start?

For patrons, on or by the 15th of March! For public readers, 2 weeks later, on the 29th of March.

I had wanted to start earlier, but I figure it’s better to give myself extra time to plan and write, rather than risk delays due to over-optimism. Things would have been starting earlier anyway, but I have to … go on a … ‘quest’? This is impossible to explain and of little interest to anybody, but there’s a matter I’ve been putting off for several years, which requires me to spend a couple of weeks elsewhere. Don’t worry, it’s nowhere near as dramatic as I’m probably making it sound; I just figured that this is a very good time to finally deal with that responsibility, in the gap between Katalepsis Book One and Two. This is also why Necroepilogos is going on a 2-week break in February; although I will still be doing some work while attending to this responsibility, I won’t be able to guarantee anything getting finished until I’m back in my usual habitat.

So, March! The ides of March, to be precise. How very auspicious.

What else? New website!

Or, maybe?

I’m a big believer in personal websites. I have nothing against Royal Road and Scribblehub, the other two places I publish my serials. I wouldn’t have the audience I do today without those websites, they’ve been invaluable for public reach, and if you’re one of the readers who prefers to read over on RR or SH, then I am very happy to have you here. Thank you!

With that said, I think it’s important for any self-published author to maintain their own publishing space, where they can do whatever they want, just in case. I wouldn’t be able to showcase all the incredible fanart without my own website on which to host it, for example.

I’ve been planning for a while now to revamp/update/remake both the Katalepsis and Necroepilogos websites. I want to make a sort of ‘hub’, I suppose, so both stories can be hosted in the same place, but still kept distinct on their own sites. I can sling my essays and such up on there as well, for the people who might be interested in seeing such things. I had intended to do this website work last year, but it turned out to be much more complex and time-consuming than I had expected, so I ended up putting it off until the end of Katalepsis Book One, which then took longer than I thought! I can’t be certain that this will happen any time soon, but at the moment my intention to to make it happen this year, however I end up doing it.

Next matter: ebooks and audiobooks! Now that Katalepsis Book One is over, I am going to try to package everything up into ebooks, like with volume one. No promises on this front though; Book Two planning and writing will come first, any additional work will have to fit around the edges of that.

I also made a promise that I would look into creating a quick and dirty epub of the entirety of Book One, for readers who prefer that. So I’ll be figuring that out shortly, I hope!

Q&A

And, finally, I have another post going up just after this one! A Q&A post, as requested and suggested by several readers and patrons — I’ll leave the details over in that post itself, rather than clogging up this one any further.

And I’ll also put a link, right here, once the post is up!

And … that’s all, for now! If you’ve made it all this way through this post, thank you! If you skipped the whole thing and scrolled down to the bottom and are now reading these words, thank you as well! Thank you for being here, dear readers. None of this is possible without all of you. I will keep doing my best to tell stories, for all of you, and for myself too.

Katalepsis Book Two will be along shortly! See you all then!